


i was meant to live among the stars

by chaWOOPa



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, F/F, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone), davenport wasn't davenported
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 07:39:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15724938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaWOOPa/pseuds/chaWOOPa
Summary: He wakes up and he knows his name. His name is Davenport. Drew Davenport. He focuses on that as his brain (still trying to adjust to the empty space where now a hundred years of his life no longer exists) rights itself and he takes a deep breath as he gathers some more facts. He loves adrenaline, is the second thing he manages to pick out of the mess of static and blank space, and suddenly more and more is falling into place. He is a gnome and he left home too early because his family was forced out of their burrow, he made money doing stunts and dangerous quests and sending it home until suddenly he couldn't find home anymore.He went to school, he knows many things but he can't quite remember what about. He thinks he has a home now, but that part ends in static so he looks around himself and finds a mechanic's home and even more falls into place.He isn't sure where he is still, but he knows who he is (he thinks he does, around the static and the blank spaces that he can't figure out). He has a starting line, at least, so he does what he has always been good at. He digs his heels in the dirt and goes.





	i was meant to live among the stars

He wakes up and he knows his name. His name is Davenport. Drew Davenport. He focuses on that as his brain ( _still trying to adjust to the empty space where now a hundred years of his life no longer exists_ ) rights itself and he takes a deep breath as he gathers some more facts. He loves adrenaline, is the second thing he manages to pick out of the mess of static and blank space, and suddenly more and more is falling into place. He is a gnome and he left home too early because his family was forced out of their burrow, he made money doing stunts and dangerous quests and sending it home until suddenly he couldn't find home anymore.   
  
He went to school, he knows many things but he can't quite remember what about. He thinks he has a home now, but that part ends in static so he looks around himself and finds a mechanic's home and even more falls into place.   
  
He isn't sure where he is still, but he knows who he is ( _he thinks he does, around the static and the blank spaces that he can't figure out_ ). He has a starting line, at least, so he does what he has always been good at. He digs his heels in the dirt and _goes_.

 

* * *

 

Davenport isn't sure where he learned to drive like he does. He has been asked many times and his usual answer is to smile and shrug, to keep the mystery alive. He sometimes wonders who he got that from, because he knows it wasn’t his parents. If you asked them a question, they _always_ answered.

 

Sometimes he will find an answer on the tip of his tongue, that he doesn’t quite understand, but he goes with anyway. "The stars," He will say, and he won’t know why, but it will feel like the full truth, "The stars taught me everything I know."

 

It isn't possible, of course, spaceflight is as much a dream as finding his family or fighting off the static in his brain. Part of him looks to the skies at night and feels the truth of it in his bones anyway.

 

He doesn’t know a lot of things. He doesn't know where he learned to drive a kart; doesn't know how he can get his crew out of tight spots with little to no damage; doesn't know where his knowledge of mechanics came from; doesn’t even know the source of the familiar love for the way the wind whips through his hair as he escapes something big and dangerous; but he looks at the stars and he does know at least one thing.   
  
He knows that up there, among the lights that wink at him every night, is where he belongs.

 

* * *

 

Davenport meets Sloane and there something familiar in the way the elven woman moves. She is _be careful i have sharp edges_ and _i grew up on the streets_ and _there is life left to live so let’s live it_ and he likes that about her. It reminds him of someone he can’t name but he called family once and he finds himself tracking her graceful movements and thinking _where is the other_ more often than is natural.

 

He chalks it up to growing with many siblings instead of one pseudo daughter.

 

She brings home a cop one day and Davenport nearly chokes on his tea after he asks “What happened to Barry, Lup?” and then realizes that he can’t quite focus on what he said except to know it wasn’t anything to do with Sloane.

 

* * *

 

Davenport likes Hurley, he thinks. She has the same longing for the stars, for something more, that he has. She would have done well with his family, whoever they were. She lends some caution to his and Sloane’s reckless chase after the next big rush of adrenaline and laughter and _oh look at that we survived again just wait until next time_ and he is glad.

 

The first time he watches someone die in a battlewagon race he doesn’t sleep for a week.

 

It doesn’t feel real. It feels like he should be mourning but all he can summon is detached resignation because they will be back later, right? He knows in his head that life and death don’t work like that, but he watches his friend fall again and again when he closes his eyes and no matter what he cannot stop thinking that when the year is up they will be back, smiling and joking and laughing with the rest of them like normal.

 

Hurley is always there to pull Davenport and Sloane in when their scheming crosses over the edge of too dangerous so Davenport doesn’t watch friends die anymore.

 

They don’t kill, they don’t get killed.

 

* * *

 

Davenport is there the day Sloane finds the sash. In fact, it isn’t Sloane who finds the sash at all, it is Davenport who picks it up first and it asks him a question he doesn’t quite hear, but he knows the answer to anyway. He throws it back at the tree it had been resting on and shakes his head clear of the vision of a beard full of flowers and a smile radiant as the sun. He doesn’t look back at the sash as it lures Sloane in, as she fights so, so hard to keep herself as she slides it on. He doesn’t look back as she tests her new powers on a small scale and slips away piece by piece.

 

He is gone before she has the chance to forget he was there in the first place.

 

He walks slowly back into town and to a place he has never visited before as static covered details taunt him with half remembered memories of a past he can’t have had. He is both there and not there as he watches snippets of a love he can feel real as the sunlight on his face and the wheel of a kart under his hand.

 

He has never been in love in this lifetime except for adrenaline and adventure.

 

He catches whispers of his name said with all the reverence of a lover. He catches snapshots of beautiful eyes that shift colors so fast he cannot tell if he dreamed them but the love they hold never wavers. He catches the scent of earth and plants and the sun, the feel of rough, calloused hands caressing his face with a gentleness that would put most mothers to shame.

 

Davenport feels warm as he walks through the empty Goldcliff streets and finds himself stopping in front of a temple to Pan.

 

Davenport has never been a religious man, but as he steps into this place, it feels a little like coming home.

 

* * *

 

Gods help him, but he cannot keep his eyes off of Merle Highchurch. Hurley teases him about it after the three boys go to bed the night before the race and he takes it lightly, teasing back about a certain elf they both know. His teasing falls a little flat in the face of what they have to do tomorrow to try and save her life.

 

Davenport hasn’t told her about how he goes to the temple of Pan and helps them garden when he can, so when Hurley points out the dirt under Merle’s fingernails and the flowers in his beard, Davenport cannot tell her what he really thinks.

 

He can’t tell her that seeing Merle Highchurch the first time felt the same as the first time he stepped into the temple. He can’t tell her that he took one look at Merle Highchurch and saw his whole universe in the lines on his face. He can’t tell her that he breathes in the smell of earth and plants and sun-warmed leather that follows and clings to the dwarf like ivy and he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is doomed.

 

He can’t tell her that Merle Highchurch feels the most like home since he competed in his first race.

 

Davenport looks at Merle Highchurch and he sees love in the crinkles on his forehead and in the hazel of his eyes. He sees _family_ and _home_ and _safety_ and _faith_ and so many other things that he can’t quite name or explain or match up with the sarcastic, hardened dwarf in front of him, but he sees them anyway. It is exciting and unsettling and unexplainable and every time he tries to delve deeper he comes up with handfuls of static, but Davenport has a feeling that the static only means he should look a little closer.

 

After all, Davenport has never been one to shy away from a challenge.

 

Merle calls himself the Owl on the track and something about the way he looks to the Hummingbird makes Davenport wonder if maybe Merle wasn’t meant to be something braver.

 

* * *

 

When the dust clears and all that is left is a cherry blossom tree, Davenport feels a grief so deep in his bones, so powerful, that he isn’t sure he knows how to contain it. It is not the stunted thing he felt the first time he saw someone die, detached and unreal. He sees their shapes in the cherry blossom tree and it _wrecks_ him.

 

He falls to his knees in the fountain and screams in anguish because there is nothing else he _can_ do now. He cries out his grief and anger at how unfair it is thatt these girls, _his girls_ , won’t be coming back. Girls who loved and lost and _lived_ with passion and fury and adventure would never be back all because of some _stupid sash_.

 

He looks at the tree made of his daughters, tears shining on his cheeks, then at the belt that took them from him and still whispers the promise of power in the back of his mind, and he feels his face twist in disgust. He picks up the sash with one hand and points at the three strangers who feel less like strangers than they should with the other.

 

“You three, you know how to stop this from happening again.” he demands, grief giving way to fury, and all of it finding its focus on Merle. “I want in.”

 

Taako opens his mouth to protest but before he can Merle nods, a small, sad smile on his face as Davenport drops the sash into his own bag to carry back to their base. There is understanding in his face, mingling with emotions that neither of the men can name even if they want to, and falling into step with the three of them feels right after so many years of feeling just a little bit wrong.

 

* * *

 

Davenport does not trust the Bureau of Balance. More specifically, he does not trust _the Director_ of the Bureau of Balance.

 

He is inoculated and some things fall into place, and he knows more about this world than he did before, but he cannot remember what part he played in the relic wars, and that more than anything makes him feel like something is wrong.

 

He cannot remember where he was, he does not know what he did, and once he knows what the static layer over some of his memories is, the layer over the rest seems far too familiar to be nothing.

 

He sees the Director and she is familiar in a way no voidfish could erase, and he sees her eyes shift when she tells him that they have never met before, and he feels more like a father than he had when he had the entire time he loved Sloane and Hurley. He can tell exactly when she is lying, and he has to wonder what else he knows about her that a father should and how he came to have this information.

 

Davenport knows in his heart that he loves Lucretia, but he does not trust the Director.

 

He is not the only one.

 

* * *

 

Davenport has never thought that his life had a plot. He is not a character in a novel, he is a person and he has a life and that is that.

 

So when the boys are called to work on candlenights and in the opportunity to snoop unobstructed he stumbles upon an entrance to a secret hanger for a ship that makes his head spin with impossible thoughts, he finds himself wondering why his life is starting to read like a novel anyway.

 

He takes his time exploring the ship that feels like home beneath his fingertips. He touches surfaces and marveles as the technology hums to life under his hands. Listens as the engine whirs gently at his mere presence on the ship and he feels tears prickle at his eyes that he can’t explain even as he looks into it and takes it apart piece by piece with his eyes as though he was the one who had built it in the first place. As he lays a hand on the cool glass covering the softly purring engine, he remembers what he used to say about his driving and the tears come faster.

 

He hadn’t _learned_ to drive among to stars, but he had certainly perfected the craft there.

 

He had lived among the stars on this ship. He can feel the truth of it in his bones and in the hum of energy under his fingertips and in the silver metal of each and every surface that makes this ship fly. He could take each system apart and put them back together by memory once, his hands could probably still do it, even if he couldn’t name the system he was rebuilding.

 

This ship had been his pride and joy, once.

 

He had lived among the stars until something, or someone, had grounded him.

 

He rests his forehead against the cool glass next to where his hand rests and he remembers, suddenly, another time, another place, where he had done with same thing. The scene around him is static, the ship itself almost entirely impossible to think about but if he concentrates on the feeling of the glass under his hand and on his forehead he can just make out the edges of a memory that hasn’t been completely taken from him.

 

“ _We are going to be amazing,_ ” he repeats quietly into the engine. He can’t think past the static in his head but he needs to remember these words, he needs them more than anything right now. “ _We are going to change the universe for the better, I know it._ ”

 

He slips back into the activity of the base just as the three reclaimers are getting back and if there is something different about the way he holds himself, well then, no one calls him on it. They lost a crewmember, after all.

 

* * *

 

Angus finds the ship three weeks after he does and Davenport watches carefully for signs of the same static thoughts that he has when Angus thinks about it. Angus writes it down once and then seems to forget about it, and Davenport doesn’t understand why he is so unaffected.

 

He notices the director sneaking down to see the ship once and he feels all at once like the answers to everything he is missing is right there on the tip of his tongue and like someone hit him in the chest with a bowling ball. He turns tail and somehow makes it to his quarters before the panic attack sets in.

 

He can’t look the director in the eyes anymore and he knows in his heart the reason why but trying to name it only ends in static.

 

* * *

 

Davenport has to grin and bear it when Lucretia summons him to ask him to lead the BoB in her absence while she goes for a weekend of leave with Merle. There is betrayal weighing heavily on the back of his tongue and the clogging up his throat as he watches them walk off together and he knows the static it comes from has to do with the ship, but that doesn’t mean he hates the taste any less.

 

Merle loves him, and he loves Merle. These facts are simple, inevitable, _easy_.

 

So when Merle takes the Director with him to the spa, he knows it is to give Davenport time to snoop to his heart’s content but he cannot convince his heart of what his brain knows no matter how hard he tries.

 

Something static is keeping him from it, so he takes Merle on their own weekend getaway when he gets back.

 

He does tell Merle about the ship he found. He doesn’t tell Merle about how right it felt to be leading.

 

* * *

 

Davenport can feel that something is wrong the moment the cannonball touches the bubble and he wishes desperately that he had been allowed to go with the boys to retrieve to Chalice. They only take an hour but they look like they lived more than that and when the only ones thrown off by the missing time are Avi and Magnus, Davenport wants nothing more than to burrow away with his boys and let them rest for as long as they need.

 

There is something weary in Taako’s eyes as he watches the town age and Davenport hates it almost as much as the missing piece behind them.

 

Davenort does not hesitate to trust the red robe despite their first meeting. After all, when the red robe speaks like home, like family, he doesn’t try to convince Davenport they aren’t family.

 

He does not tell the red robe that, and neither does the red robe ask.

 

* * *

 

Davenport and Merle are on a date when Taako takes Death to wine and pottery night. They are wandering the quad, looking for a nice spot to have a dinner under the stars and enjoy the expensive brandy Merle bought Davenport for Candlenights so, so long ago.

 

Davenport almost wants to take Merle to the ship.

 

All good things must end, however, and Davenport only remembers this when Taako comes walking-no, sashaying out onto the quad with a stranger in tow. Merle perks up imperceptibly, straining to hear what the two of them are saying and Davenport finds himself struggling to try and recall where he has seen tall, dark, and handsome before.

 

He hasn’t, even if Merle has.

 

Their date is over in moments, ending in what Davenport can only describe as a disaster, but Taako is in high spirits anyway. He hums as he finishes making his way across the quad towards the elevator to the Tres Horny Bois’ dorm room. After a second Davenport turns to face Merle and the questions die on his lips at the grin spreading across Merle’s.

 

“Looks like our Taako found happiness in Death,” he says and something in Davenport’s chest twists at the statement despite it being a goof. He leans in to Merle’s side, looking at his hands and suddenly a lot less interested in the brandy bottle than in sleeping right here and now. “Figures,” Merle huffs, a little more serious. “Life hasn’t been kind to him so far, and if that dead boy is anything but nice I’ll kick his ass a second time.”

 

Davenport has the sinking feeling that neither of them know the full extent to the truth in Merle’s statement.

 

* * *

 

They lose contact with the three reclaimers before they even enter wonderland and the echo of a grief he has felt many times before cripples Davenport as he clutches his stone of farspeech desperately in the hope that maybe, just maybe, Merle and Magnus and Taako will come home safe.

 

He doesn’t have much faith.

 

* * *

 

Davenport doesn’t give himself time to grieve Magnus. There is something black in the sky and his whole being is telling him it is time to _go_ . It is time to grab the ship and _run_ . Instead he grabs ahold of Merle and _doesn’t let go_ ; not when they find Magnus’s body in fantasy Costco and he finds out Magnus is the mannequin; not when his hands dispel the illusion before the alarm can even go off and he has to wonder where that muscle memory came from; not when they bypass the lock on the vault door of the director’s inner-office; not when angus is the first to realize that the tank on the desk may not be just a simple tank.

 

He barely lets go to drink the second voidfish ichor.

 

* * *

 

His first thought upon emerging from the fog of stolen memories is to look at the sky and finally, fully understand the instinct in him yelling at him to take the ship, _his Starblaster_ , and run.

 

Space, out there among the stars weaving through planets and asteroids and heavenly bodies of all kinds, that is where he belongs, that is where he made a home for 100 years, that is where it will be safest right now.

 

He looks down from the windowed ceiling at Lucretia ( _she was so young when we left… She should still be so, so young_ ) and he says, “Lu-lucretia...” he cannot stop the horror from making making his voice shake or his face twist, “What have you done?”

**Author's Note:**

> so, im in love with the concept of a davenport who was stripped down to his most bsic of characteristics, but wasn't left with just his name, and this is, quite literally, one of my favorite things i have written. 
> 
> also, im in love with davenchurch, thanks for coming to my ted talk.


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